Norah Vincent Quotes

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Norah Vincent

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 20, 1968

The sex of spouses has nothing to do with why relationships fail. They fail for lack of love or, more precisely, for lack of understanding what love is and what it entails over the long haul.

Norah Vincent

Incidental consequences are often unpleasant; the kinds of reactions you can expect when you say something asinine or unpopular in public.

Norah Vincent

Denouncing someone for his views is kosher. But intimidation and coercion - including the kind of economic coercion that threatens jobs and livelihoods - are censorship, however you spin it.

Norah Vincent

You can fire a professor because he's a bad or unqualified teacher, but you shouldn't be able to fire him because he expresses unpopular views. Otherwise, the 1st Amendment would be meaningless. After all, how free can your speech be if your job is in peril if you say the wrong thing?

Norah Vincent

Advertisers should be forced, by contract, to commit their advertisements for a specified amount of time, regardless of what happens on a show.

Norah Vincent

Americans love a morality tale, especially one that's been taken from real life. We like facile categories of good and bad, and we like creating fiery male leads to drop neatly into them.

Norah Vincent

If Monica Lewinsky is living proof of anything, it's that suffering is good for the soul.

Norah Vincent

In our fast-food nation, we tend to think that the intellectual life, like everything else, can be had pre-chewed and in bulk just for the asking. But that attitude is a grievous insult to the people who spend their lives earning the respect of their literary peers and versing themselves in the arduous ways of their trade.

Norah Vincent

People who dislike Oprah's Book Club dislike it for the same reason that they dislike Barnes & Noble. The fact that the two do a brisk business isn't accidental.

Norah Vincent

Books are not commodities, but the gilded age of treadmill publishing - to which Winfrey has contributed her demeaning sensibility - has made them so, thereby spawning harried plagiarists such as Stephen Ambrose and yellow journalists like David Brock.

Norah Vincent

If Oprah's Book Club is gone, good riddance.

Norah Vincent

Motherhood is more than a biological imperative.

Norah Vincent

The fact that you carried an embryo to term does not make you a mother any more than it makes you an obstetrician.

Norah Vincent

For native New Yorkers and pilgrims alike, there have been few things more heartbreaking about the protracted aftermath of Sept. 11 than the garish gap in the city's famous profile, that blank, vacuous space on the horizon where the World Trade Center once so impressively stood.

Norah Vincent

Sometimes, the best way to keep hate from ruling us is to strip the meaning from the words behind which it tries to hide.

Norah Vincent

Isn't it curious how quickly a conservative becomes a libertarian when he's caught sinning? There's a lesson in that somewhere, if only the Christian right could bring itself to learn it.

Norah Vincent

Libertarians believe that the government should stay out of private lives on issues that don't have a bearing on society as a whole.

Norah Vincent

Defending legacy admissions is a mistake, not just because it is inconsistent with opposition to affirmative action but also because legacy admissions are indefensible.

Norah Vincent

Private academic institutions admit the children of alumni because substantial parts of their operating budgets come from the financial contributions of alumni.

Norah Vincent

Though I am by no means as doctrinaire as I once was about political and social matters, I'm still a libertarian fiscal conservative. In the most concrete terms, this means I don't believe that penalizing people who make more than $250,000 a year is going to fix the economy. In fact, I think it may worsen it.

Norah Vincent